Characterizing multimedia kernels on general-purpose processors

Media applications have been driving microprocessor development for more than a decade. Future multimedia applications will have much higher computational requirements. Indeed, tomorrow's PC experiences will be even richer in audio-visual effects, easier to use, and, more importantly, computing will merge with communications. Such application characteristics will differ from current application characteristics and thus, a new detailed analysis of such kernels is required. This paper proposes a selection of key kernels we believe will be prominent across applications running on future processors. An extensive study of these applications on current general-purpose processor architectures makes it possible to determine future media and communication characteristics and to identify bottlenecks that are not well addressed in current designs.